


What They Call Us

by Capucine



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1910s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Bigotry & Prejudice, Crossdressing, F/M, Hibernophobia, Immigration & Emigration, Period-Typical Racism, Sinophobia, Slight fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-14
Updated: 2015-11-14
Packaged: 2018-05-01 13:25:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5207480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capucine/pseuds/Capucine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Batman-set-in-the-1910s drabble. It follows Cassandra Cain and Tim Drake as they try to protect immigrant voters from Nativists. However, the experience leaves Tim wondering how Cassandra puts up with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What They Call Us

**Author's Note:**

> Cass is disguised as a boy for the sake of blending in and being taken somewhat seriously, and so on. This is based on my challenge to myself that I had to take one of the AUs offered on a page of random AU tags and do a Batman one, so...Hope you like it.

Tim peered around the corner. He sighed, softly, to Cassandra, who crouched next to him with a serious expression on her face.

“Yes, there they are. They've got their pig's blood and their fists ready for the voters who speak anything other than what they deem good English.” He gave a snort. “As if the English think we speak good English.”

Cassandra gave him a quirked eyebrow, not that he could see it, he could just tell. She was passing as a boy right now, cap brought down low over her eyes. Both of them were dressed to blend in.

“I know,” Tim sighed again. “Well, we'll have to teach them voting is an American right, fresh off the boat or not.”

He could tell the look Cassandra was giving him roughly translated to, 'As long as you're a man,' but he brushed it off for now. She wasn't accusing him. She already knew his feelings on women's suffrage, and that it was important to him, but right then, there was the matter of the Nativist bastards about to unleash hell on the immigrants who came to vote.

Tim pinched between his brows, knowing what his mother would think if she saw him now.

And that was about when the first Irish-born citizen stepped up to the voting booth. He was a sallow man, the kind who worked in a factory every day but Sunday, who probably could barely get enough to eat but still saved away pennies for the local Catholic school.

“Excuse me, good sirs,” he said, somewhat mildly but firmly, that Irish accent lyrical in his words. Some of the immigrants were the type to pick a fight; he clearly wasn't. But judging from the his posture and the scars up and down his arms, Tim guessed he would fight, if he had to, and had before.

“Why, Paddy, you're showing up to vote? In that state? Fellows, he's far too drunk to be voting _responsibly_ ,” came the sneer from one of the men, with a handlebar mustache, lounging in the entrance.

“I haven't touched the bottle in years,” the man replied, dark brown brows brought down in mild consternation. He seemed frustrated, but unwilling to show it too much, as if he knew it would bait the bullies.

“You fucking ape, you have, you're piss drunk and in need of help—isn't he, boys?” the handlebar mustache man was practically grinning, but in a purely evil, sadistic way.

“We could probably knock the drink right out of him,” another man suggested, trying to pretend like this was a reasonable response, but failing utterly. His anger was clear, his need to hurt the supposed source of his frustration clear.

“Now hold on, I haven't had a drop, and I have a right to vote--” the man said, holding out his hands as they seemed ready to converge on him.

“Ha! You have the right—it's bad enough, the way it is, with every fucking man who drops himself into the lap of Ellis Island being allowed to vote. Why, it was bad enough we allowed those ******s to vote, now you got to do it too?” The handlebar mustache man let out a humorless bark of laughter. “Teach this green piece of shit that he should head back to fucking Ireland—where he can live with the rest of the potato ******s and leave America to the fucking Americans!”

“I am American!” the man cried, just as one man raised one of the containers of pig's blood, and another raised a plank of wood.

“You can't even say American!” the handlebar mustache man sneered.

Just as things were about to go to hell in a handbasket, Cassandra and Tim dashed forward—mostly because Cassandra had decided that now was the time to intervene, despite Dick and Bruce not being here yet. Tim was feeling irritable at this change of plans, but he didn't have much choice—he certainly wasn't about to let Cassandra do it alone.

“Stop,” Cassandra said, voice full of danger.

The men took one look at her, and burst out laughing.

“Some tiny little Chinese boy is gonna fight us? Wait, let me go get my daughter, she's twelve, it'll be a fair fight!”

That man was about to regret those words.

Tim barely got to blink before Cassandra had taken him down, out cold on the cobblestones.

She stood, brushing off her pants. “Next.”

But there was to be no next. The Nativists were frankly cowards, and took to their heels. Handlebar mustache man lay out cold on the street. Tim shook his head, shifting out of the fighting stance he'd barely been able to take on.

The Irish-born man stared at her a second. She nodded at him, as if telling him, 'Yes. Go vote.'

A dark look came over his face. “I don't need help from a Chinaman. Don't come near me.” 

Tim stared, a little bit stunned. He couldn't quite comprehend the ingratitude, the act of looking his savior in the face and being upset.

But Cassandra was clearly used to it, and had apparently decided not to show him why he should respect her, because she just moved away, heading back for their hiding place.

Tim felt his anger flare up. “Sh—He saved you! Possibly even saved your life! What kind of a man--”

“A man who doesn't take charity from a Chinaman,” the Irish-born man said flatly and yet defensively, and Tim realized instantly: it was a matter of pride.

Stupid, dumb pride, as Chinese men were probably seen as the least virile kind of men in the city, among other reasons that people hated them. They'd even been banned from entering the country a few decades back, though that hadn't made the general fear of the 'inscrutable Oriental' disappear.

Tim clenched his teeth, ready to shout at this man, to get him to give credit where it was due, but Cassandra's hand closed on his shoulder, and she directed him towards the hiding place, shaking her head.

“Cassandra, you saw the way he—he--!”

“Yes. It is bad,” Cassandra agreed, and he knew he saw hurt flash through her eyes. But then she looked at him rather placidly. “But he is hurting too.”

Tim sighed. He tucked his hands under his arms, and said, “Not everyone has to use their hurt as a reason to lash out at innocent people around them.”

Cassandra shrugged. “He is one of them, for now.”

“Why not whip him? Why not show him how wrong he is?” Tim demanded.

Cassandra gave a slight smile. “It wouldn't be fair.”

Tim had to concede, that was true. He sighed, again, and patted Cassandra on the shoulder. “Well, I thought you did an excellent thing. You are truly a defender of justice, or whatever Clark seems to like to call it.”

Cassandra grinned. “You too, Tim.”

Dick and Bruce showed up about then, saw the spilled pig's blood leftover and the lack of Nativists and demanded to know what had happened.

Tim shrugged. “Cassandra handled it.”

And they shared a conspiratorial look.

Bruce was probably not going to let them out of his sight for a few days or a week.

**Author's Note:**

> Unfortunately, minority groups hating on each other was and is a thing. And yeah, that was the n-word being 'blotted out.' The Irish were considered, for a long time, the 'green' equivalent of black people, and y'all probably know how white Americans tended to think of black people at the time. 
> 
> So, what happened with the black people and the Irish immigrants was that essentially they turned on each other--and the Irish won the fight not to be considered on the same level, mostly because physically, they could be absorbed into the white society. Before that, Irish people weren't considered 'white.' They were called green and generally considered to be about as human as apes by a lot of people, a mindset brought by the British mainly.
> 
> People were fucking assholes to the Irish throughout much of history, at least more modern, recorded history. People from other countries would literally go there and write about it like 'oh my god, Ireland is a shitstain, it would be best if the earth opened up and swallowed it into the bowels of Hell--also, the Irish are all ugly, lazy bastards, goddamn, they have no idea what the fuck they're doing with farming and shit, what idiots' when the main problem with Ireland was, you guessed it, systematic bigotry. :D Hence, the lack of improvement in farming and so on.
> 
> Anyway, as for the Chinese, they were very much distrusted and outright hated by the Americans, to the point laws were passed to disallow them emigrating to America. This is called the Yellow Fever--a rather disproportionate fear that the Chinese, who were, by a huge majority, men, were going to rape all the white women and steal shit and stuff. Mostly the rape thing was the ongoing fear. Which is funny-ish, considering the general stereotype about them as very un-manly and stuff (black men got the opposite end of that, basically seen as rape-beasts where white women were involved, a notion that is still somewhere in the American psyche). But yes. Lots of racism against the Chinese and other East Asian groups.
> 
> A more mild part of this was the 'inscrutable Oriental' thing. It was basically the stereotype that East Asians were 'unreadable' and their emotions, presuming they had any, were difficult to discern. This was probably mostly because the Chinese were fairly guarded and their methods of expressing emotion were just a titch different from American or even much of Europe. For instance, smiling could be a nervous or fearful thing rather than just a sign of happiness (or a weird anger thing), which contributed to the stereotype you've probably seen of the Chinese caricature with the huge grin (and other stereotypical shit).
> 
> Anyway, on top of that, the Chinese were in a somewhat similar boat to people like the Poles in terms of language--Mandarin, Cantonese, Polish, all incredibly difficult languages to learn English from, among others. People such as the Dutch, where a whole shitload of words are in common/almost the same, or people like the Irish, who spoke a different version of English, had a much easier time adapting in that sense.
> 
> So yeah. History and all that shit. Hope you liked it.


End file.
